Rebranding

Well the old Wulfsblood.net domain finally expired on me. I'll be sorting out a new one in a few days, to reflect the point that I really haven't done much huntering in the last year or so. In the meantime, feel free to point your links at:

http://ulushnar.blogspot.com

Until I can find something better.

I really haven't updated this thing in about three weeks now, so apologies. In the interim, I finally got off my arse and got Graysun, my Death Knight, to 80. Originally I wanted to make him a DPS/PVP character, but the sad realities of getting pugs has forced me to spec him as a tank. I took the advice of our DK tank and specced him Unholy, although now that I've played with him a while, I'm starting to get a better idea of what's required.

I will say though that DPSing/Tanking as a Death Knight has given me a new appreciation of how much easier we have it. The lack of reliable frontloaded aggro is a massive pain when pugging in particular. When I went back to playing Ulu, I almost laughed at how easy it was.

Speaking of Ulu, I've hadd occasion to experiment with him as Retribution in Naxx10-level gear and I really liked the results! I cannot wait for dual speccing in 3.1! Also, Ulu finally got his 4th piece of T7 on Friday past. He now has everything except the crappy helm. I'm looking forward to trying my bubble wall out on something big and nasty before much longer.

3.1 Changes announced.

Ok, so some of the proposed changes to the Paladin class in 3.1 have been announced. It's a weird mixed bag:

* Blessing of Kings – this spell is now a base ability trainable by all paladins.

I'd like to say: Finally! But I'm curious about what our new tier 1 5-pointer will be.

* Exorcism – this spell now causes damage to all types of enemy targets. However, it always critical strikes undead or demon targets. This change should make sure paladin damage doesn’t drop when going from Naxxramas to later tiers of content.

Another awesome change! Giving Paladins another ranged, on-demand damage ability is great. Combine it with the Glyph and we have another interrupt with a 15-sec cooldown. I'm curious about it's use in PVE though, and how one would go weaving it into the normal 969 rotation.

* Shield of the Templar now causes your Avenger’s Shield and Shield of the Righteousness to silence targets for 3 sec. The old damage bonus of this talent has been folded into Holy Shield, Avenger’s Shield, and Shield of the Righteousness.

The change to Avenger's Shield is awesome, it's something we've been begging for since the WotLK beta opened. The change to Shield of Righteousness is beyond awesome, so I'm not sure if it'll stay.

* Ardent Defender, Improved Hammer of Justice, One-Handed Weapon Specialization and more have had their ranks reduced.

This, plus Baselining BoK removes a lot of the bloat from the Protection Tree. It might actually be possible to get all the "necessary" talents for 51 points now.

* Guarded by the Light – no longer reduces the mana cost of shield spells, but now has a 50/100% chance to refresh Divine Plea duration.

Sounds good, but a 50/100% chance on what? On refreshing Holy Shield? On Block/Parry/Dodge? On taking damage?

* Judgements of the Just – now also reduces the cooldown of Hammer of Justice by 10/20 seconds and increases the duration of the Seal of Justice stun effect by 0.5/1 second.

Adds some primarily PVP utility to Thunderjudge. Doesn't make the talent any less mandatory, but it, like the Shield of the Templar change and the Exorcism change makes it more fun to be a Protadin in PVP.

Interesting changes. I didn't think there was anything particularly "wrong" with the state of Tankadins, but the new changes will allow us to pick up more fun talents from other trees at less sacrifice. I might actually be tempted to take Ulu into an Arena again as well.

Now we just have to wait and see how many of these changes make it to live!

A New Direction, or just a Diversion

I've been hitting my head off the notion for the last month and a half that I have nothing really to write about. The first tier of 5-10man content has proven to be trivial (with the exception of Malygos and Satharion +adds), and strategy guides for each of the bosses fill the interwebs. I have no special insight to offer about most of them.

There's no deep mystery about tank gearing either. You get the Defense minimum, you get enough Effective Health to survive the bosses burst potential and then you stack avoidance and threat stats as appropriate. It's effective, but also bo-ring and again, the internet has lots of guides on this. I might write a post at some point listing my preferred stats in order, but that'll be a wee bit down the line.

The only thing I can talk about that I haven't really covered to date is my experiences in leading a small casual guild, which has been something of an eye-opener. I have no intention of making this blog AngryRaidLeader 2.0, but hey, it'll give me something to write about until something interesting happens (like the 3.1 patch hitting the PTR)

Plus ca change...

So Smart Casual's sufferring a little atm. We've had three members go off on holiday at the same time as well as one of our other healers leave. We can still scrape a raid together for Naxxramas, but Malygos is proving to be a real arse and we can't even start work on adding drakes to Sartharion.

Outside of raids, I've only been logging in to do Jewelcrafting daily quests for Ulu, and to abuse his Icy Prism cooldown. I've found him inundated with Scarlet Rubies, so I picked up the Bold Scarlet Ruby pattern this morning and churned out seven of them! Given they're selling at around 100G a pop on my server, I should make back most of the money I threw at learning Jewelcrafting. If I can keep this up for a few weeks, I might even earn the cash needed to get epic flying for Graysun (which would in turn encourage me to get the last level I need with him.)

Even if I don't, I can throw them in Ulu's Ret/DPS gear and still find a use for them.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: I like Jewelcrafting.